Oscar Grau Martin
"By the time I was a teenager, the thing that I enjoyed most was watching movies. So when my family asked me what I planned to do with my life - I said that I wanted to do sound for movies."
"My parents didn’t see this as proper job, so for them, this was a totally weird response. They said, they could understand if I wanted to be a director or a Hollywood DP like my cousin, but sound they didn’t understand at all!"
"What they didn’t know, was the thing I loved to do as a kid, was to sneak around the house at night. After they went to bed, I loved stay up all night playing games. I would get bored every night and this was one way that I could keep myself entertained."
“After a couple of years of doing this most nights, I found that I was thinking more and more about the sounds around me. So that I never woke my parents, I had to take care not to make any noise at all. I soon became very good at thinking and listening to the various sounds through out my parent’s home.”
"Because my biggest challenge was to not wake anyone, I started to learn the noises that different doors made and which floorboards didn’t creak. I started to become very conscious of sound, which helps me now as a professional to hear the different perceptions of sounds. So I guess you could say that my fascination with sound, really started when I was very young."
"How I came to love sound, must be somewhat unique. Even at film school on my first day at Catalunya, the lecturer asked everybody who wanted to be a director or DP. They all put their hands up except for me. At the time, I was sitting there thinking that maybe I was in the wrong class or something, because no one wanted to do sound."
"When you are the only person doing sound at your college, you are guaranteed of being very busy all of the time. I had so much fun at college, because I was doing sound on so many student projects."
"For the first time in my life, I found something that I was really good at. With only a couple of people in your class doing sound, you soon get to know the lecturers really well. With a class so small it was the very best education imaginable."
"I was also incredibly lucky, because one of my lectures was an industry professional by the name of Isaac Bonfill. Isaac had worked on at least fifty movies at this time and was pretty much a legend in the film industry in Spain."
"While I was finishing my final year, Isaac got me a job working on a leading TV show in Spain called ‘Buenafuente’, or ‘The late show’. I was thinking of turning this job down, because it was still my dream to work only on movies. Isaac then promised to get me working on a movie by summer, which he did! And that’s how I finished off my final year, working on a TV show at nights and working on my first movie with Timothy Hutton."
"The next year, I continued with ‘Buenafuente’ and then worked on another movie in the summer. Although the TV experience was incredible, I really had a passion to do more movies. One of the leading production companies in Madrid, then offered for me to work for them. Working for Mundo Ficcion Production was a great opportunity, as I got to work on a couple more movies and on a number of TV series for the national broadcaster in Spain."
"After a year and half working in Madrid, I then moved back home to Barcelona where I freelanced for a year. I started to get a reputation that year and found myself very busy doing TV commercials and independent films. It was at this time, that my lecturer from college, suggested that we start our own production company here in Barcelona called SOM-MOS."
"My partner Isaac, is a very famous sound guy, so it didn’t take too long before we were doing lots of TV shows and movies. Then we went through the usual process of hiring more people and purchasing more gear and growing into a bigger company. By this time, we were doing the production and post production finishing of sound for a number of TV series, commercials and movies."
"Then the economic crisis in Europe started to hit Spain, about two years after we opened SOM-MOS. We survived in the end, by focusing completely on TV commercials. Barcelona is famous for commercials, because it has beautiful light, it’s by the sea and has the most incredible architecture imaginable."
"Even though we were very successful doing commercials, my whole reason for getting into sound was to do movies. So I said to my business partner that I wanted to try L.A and see if I could get in to the movie industry there."
"When I first moved to L.A it was really, really tough finding work. I ended up looking at Craig's List doing low paying work for indie directors. When I worked for these guys, they couldn’t believe how experienced I was. Before long, my reputation started to get around L.A and then more and more work came in for me. This was critical, because I needed the right amount of hours working in the US, to be invited to join the Sound Union."
"When I was finally admitted into the Union, they told me that I was the first person from Spain to join them. As soon as I became a member of the IATSE Local 695, I started getting a lot of documentary work."
"I had no troubles working with the directors here in California, given that I speak Spanish, English and French. So when the BBC were doing an American production for Louis Theroux in South L.A, they needed someone who was fluent in both English and Spanish. We were shooting in places in L.A. where even the locals didn’t speak English! So I found myself being the sound guy, guide and translator on that particular series of documentaries."
"After the Louis Theroux TV series, I started to get a lot more work as a sound supervisor working on some really big projects, like ‘The Game’, ‘Dig it’ and Red Bull’s ‘@ Large with Diablo’. Although, working on so many TV series is great, my real passion has always been for movies. So I now split my time between movie production here in the L.A. and a couple of movie projects each year in Spain."
"I guess my first big movie here in the US as a sound sixer, was ‘Atrocious’. This movie made it to number two on Netflix in 2012, and was super popular in the US, Canada and Columbia. The next major film for me, was ‘Son of Cain’, in which I was nominated for ‘Best Sound’ in the 2014 Gaudi Awards."
"This summer, I just finished up on the Hollywood feature film ‘PET’, with Dominic Monaghan, Ksnia Solo and Janette McCurdy. Now, I am back in Madrid shooting a big comedy over here, called ‘Los del Tunnel’."
"These days, my home base is Silver Lake in Los Angeles, where I am getting more opportunities to work on more union movies than ever before. I am also getting a lot of work on films in Spain as well, so it really is the best of both worlds for me at the moment."